Be Like Brit Orphanage dedicated in Haiti

Sunday

Jan 6, 2013 at 6:00 AMJan 6, 2013 at 7:11 PM

By Shaun Sutner TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFF

Leonard F. Gengel is a brash, confident doer who persevered against odds to build an orphanage far from his family's Holden home after his teenage daughter, Britney, died in an earthquake here three years ago.

Saturday, at the morning dedication of the Be Like Brit Orphanage on a Haitian mountainside, Mr. Gengel broke down as he spoke to a Haitian and American crowd of more than 100 of seeing Britney's eyes for the first time on the day of her birth.

“Now I know that when those children walk into this orphanage, Britney's spirit will live and I will see those beautiful eyes again,” Mr. Gengel, 52, said as he choked back a sob.

The hourlong ecumenical ceremony ended with a collective singing of the spiritual “Oh Happy Day,” led by a choir of Haitian teenagers, with Mr. Gengel and his wife, Cherylann, singing and swaying along with the visitors.

Meanwhile, five pastors, including two Roman Catholic priests from the U.S., a minister and professor from Becker College in Worcester, and a Haitian evangelical preacher and a Haitian Catholic priest, stood hand in hand before a wooden cross as the audience members all held hands.

There was a sense of bittersweet sadness — a recognition of the destructive power of tragedy coupled with the capacity to overcome grief with hope that the Gengels have demonstrated, many who have helped them in their venture have observed.

With Mr. Gengel's Haitian construction supervisor, Kervince “Gama” Parayson, a former Athol resident, translating in the local Creole language, Mrs. Gengel remarked on this contradiction.

“It's a day of mixed emotions. It's a day of crying. I'm so proud of my husband and all he has accomplished,” she said of Mr. Gengel, an accomplished builder of many upscale homes in Central Massachusetts over the last two decades. “Today's a day for being grateful.”

The orphanage's formal opening in this coastal town about 70 miles southwest of the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, came nearly three years after Britney died in the wreckage of the Hotel Montana in Port-au-Prince on Jan. 12, 2010.

The Gengels' nonprofit, Be Like Brit, has raised about $2 million for construction. The couple's book, “Heartache and Hope in Haiti: the Britney Gengel Story,” was released this week, and a members group of about 70 Americans — including many Gengel family relatives, were handed copies as they boarded planes in Boston, Newark and Miami Friday for flights here.

The entire group slept in bunk beds — two to six to a room — in the 11 children's rooms in the orphanage. The building has more than 35 rooms altogether, including common areas, an apartment, kitchen, playrooms, and meeting spaces and dorms for visiting volunteers, academics, medical personnel and others.

The orphanage is equipped with a nanotechnology water filtering system, about 80 room fans and a modern septic system — all rarities in Haiti. The orphanage also distributes free, clean water daily to neighbors in the hillside community of Icondo, named after the mountain on which the building stands surrounded by 15-foot security walls topped with shards of embedded glass.

Britney was in Haiti with a group from Lynn University in Boca Raton, Fla. Three other Lynn students and two faculty members died that day. Two students who survived the quake at the iconic hotel, where Bill and Hillary Clinton honeymooned, are with the group of Americans who are visiting the orphanage.

Saturday afternoon, Mr. Gengel led visitors to this town's fishing village, where Britney was scheduled to go with the Florida-based nonprofit aid group, Food for the Poor, the day after her death.

Joshua Steinwand, 38, a nephew of Mr. Gengel and Worcester native who lives in Boston, said after returning from the foray to the fishing village that Britney's trip to Haiti and experience volunteering with orphans here was as much a part of her personality as being a fun-loving 19-year-old.

“It was in character for her,” Mr. Steinwand said. “She was always a caring person. She was a normal person, but she was good to everyone.”

The dedication ceremony, Mr. Steinwand said, had less of a tragic feeling than many of the events he has been to for Britney.

“This was more hopeful,” he said. “It was nice.”

The biggest challenge now, said the Gengels and their newly hired orphanage director, Jonathan LaMare, 34, is recruiting the children who will populate the orphanage.

Haitian government officials recently have talked about cracking down on substandard orphanages amid general concern in the country about parents purposely giving their children to orphanages in the belief they will be better cared for.

“We don't want to take children who have a family. We don't want to break up families,” Mr. Gengel said on the bus ride from Port-au-Prince to Grande Goave. “That's not why we're doing this.”

Mr. LaMare, a former sociology professor at the State University of New York in Plattsburgh who helped run an orphanage in Rwanda, said BLB's strategy will be to take things slowly and add a few children at a time. Initially, the range of ages will be from 3 to 8.

“If there's one thing I learned working in Rwanda and here is nothing goes the way you plan it,” he said. Mr. LaMare has a three-year contract and plans to take three or four “rest and relaxation” breaks a year during what will otherwise likely be a seven-day-a-week job.

A Westminster couple who are co-directors of the orphanage's medical clinic, Dr. Gregory Ciottone and his wife, Amalia, a trauma nurse, along with Susan Johnson, professor of nursing at Quinsigamond Community College in Worcester, were along for the trip.

Dr. Ciottone, director of Harvard University Medical School's disaster relief section, noted in an interview that Haiti's grossly inadequate sanitation infrastructure is a direct cause of some of the nation's health epidemics such as cholera, malaria and dengue fever.

During the American visitors' bus trip along Haiti's National Route 2, Dr. Ciottone pointed to dried-out stream- and riverbeds, strewn with trash, with goats, pigs and even emaciated cattle picking through the garbage as children played in the water.

“That's a petri dish for bacteria,” Dr. Ciottone said.

Ross Pentland, 25, another of Mr. Gengel's nephews, spent four months in Haiti in 2011 helping to jump-start construction of the sprawling concrete building, which is expected to house 66 boys and girls.

Mr. Pentland, a Holden native now living in Florida, said it has been “pretty eye opening” to see the freshly painted building, with its sweeping view of the sea and the town in the valley below, finally completed.

A top U.S. embassy official, consul general Jay Smith, was on hand for the dedication, along with U.S. Rep. James P. McGovern, D-Worcester, who led Mr. Gengel and other family members of quake victims into Haiti 11 days after the disaster.

“You've managed to take this tragedy and turn it into a sort of triumph of the human spirit,” Mr. Smith said, addressing the Gengels and their sons, Bernie, 20, and Richie, 17, who sat on the small stage behind him in a bright open courtyard.

“You make me proud to be a representative of the American people,” Mr. Smith said.

The Rev. Debra Pallatto-Fontaine, a United Church of Christ minister and professor of teacher education and family studies at Becker, blessed the building.

“Creator God, we ask your blessing upon this space and for the parents, Len and Cherylann,” she said.

Now that the orphanage-building project is 99 percent complete (the Gengels plan to add soccer fields and finish some interior details) Mr. Gengel, in an interview, said he plans to do more building.

In the short term, he said, he intends to use visiting college volunteers and others to build small nearly earthquake-proof homes in the orphanage neighborhood for locals who can show a deed to land.

He and friends have already built a few and they plan to replicate the model, which takes a small group about a week to put up.

“Our focus is this community,” Mr. Gengel said.

Contact Shaun Sutner by email at ssutner@telegram.com and on Twitter at @ssutner.